Director Steven Soderbergh on the set
Soderbergh on the set with actress Marion Cotillard
CONTAGION
B
USA (105 mi) 2011 d: Steven Soderbergh
Let’s take another look at Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion.
A blast from the past, like a public service announcement, where in times of
need we turn to an apocalyptic fever dream that is certainly representative of
the current worldwide panic and scare from coronavirus, described as a
pandemic, with more than 125,000 recorded cases internationally and nearly 5000
deaths so far, where Italy, in particular, has been devastated, originally
thinking this was just like the flu, but it’s not, as numbers soar, especially
among the elderly. China, Italy, South Korea, and Iran have been the
hardest hit, while the U.S. is just coming to terms with it, where elite Ivy
League colleges are sending students home while other major businesses and
institutions are shutting their doors, conducting their business online,
causing major event postponements and cancellations, with governments
minimizing the sizes of public crowds and urging people to stay indoors, while
professional sports teams are now playing before empty stadiums or suspended
altogether (what about the Olympic Games?), as the hyped up international
public health concerns begin to take shape.
For the latest updates, there is a website tracker, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/,
but for more information please visit the websites of the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention and the World
Health Organization.
Perhaps an exaggerated comment on the SARS epidemic when
people around the world were wearing surgical masks, where one recalls a World
Diving Championship around 2003 taking place in Mexico City where spectators
were urged “not” to attend due to the spreading epidemic, so the athletes
performed before a worldwide television audience but also to a completely quiet
and empty stadium, which was eerily spooky. Yes, this film features
plenty of people in surgical masks, perhaps more than any other movie on
record, but that’s only the backdrop to the story, which is the outbreak of a
new deadly virus responsible for spreading a worldwide epidemic of such massive
proportions that 1 out of every 12 humans on earth would perish within the
first three months. Wow, what a bummer, you might think, but this
is actually one of the better Soderbergh efforts in the past decade.
Using a cast of thousands, not to mention four Oscar winners, the director has
lined his film with familiar faces, where each is somehow affected by this deadly
outbreak. Despite a surprisingly realistic script by Scott Z. Burns,
that’s not the best of it, as Soderbergh opens his film with an amusing series
of shots, each one filled with multiple clues on how a virus can spread, where
the upbeat, heavily percussive electronic music has the feel of a processional
march, where the audience is immediately pulled into the atmospheric mood
through a clever intro. The astonishing music, easily the best thing in
the film, is by Cliff Martinez, who also does the music in the much heralded,
upcoming Nicolas Winding Refn film Drive
(2011), which opens this week, but also Traffic
(2000) and The
Limey (1999), two of Soderbergh’s best films. The film is shot in
digital by the director, but is suitable for IMAX theaters, designed to be
blown up on a big screen, so the look of the film is high quality, where
Soderbergh may be the digital era’s leading proponent. Immediately, the
director takes us on a journey around the world, counting down the days on the
screen from the initial outbreak, showing cities with their accompanying
population around the world where it is spreading the fastest. Like all
the best works, what distinguishes this movie is a gorgeous opening and closing
sequence, where unfortunately the middle is not nearly as memorable, subject to
plenty of uneven moments.
Rather than list off the names of the cast, some of whom
have humorous references because of what characters they play in other
ventures, suffice it to say they just keep popping up onscreen, but as this is
a disaster flick, don’t expect many of them to stick around for long. The
fun is seeing how the horror will all play out, and in this, the director
really has his hand on the stylish atmospheric feel, as this actually resembles
a ZODIAC (2007) medical procedural, which unravels with near mathematical
precision, as immediately the Center for Disease Control and the World Health
Organization are under siege to find the source of the problem and initiate a
worldwide vaccine, a process that can takes months and years, but the death
rate is too steep and the population is on the verge of panic. For this
reason, the health department spokespersons remain calm, offer little new
information, but attempt to project a rational and systematic approach on how
to eradicate this problem. But as they initially make so little progress,
inundated by the effects of one health disaster after another, they certainly
don’t have much information to offer the public. Instead, this void is
filled by the morally dubious world of Internet bloggers, where one doctor
contemptuously utters, “Blogging is not writing. It's just graffiti with
punctuation.” Nonetheless, rumors spread like wildfire on the Internet,
which has the capacity to stir the public into a frenzy, where people lock
themselves indoors to avoid contact with others, as that is the only surefire
method to avoid infection. This leads to a mutiny of workers staying
home, including police and fire departments, grocery stores, restaurants and
shopping malls, not to mention healthcare workers, all of whom think their line
of work in dealing with the public is a death sentence. Like a vision of
the apocalypse, where looters and rioters roam the streets unimpeded and the
legions of sick patients are housed in indoor warehouses or football stadiums,
society all but collapses as there is no police presence, much like the actual
disastrous experience from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (2005).
While there are many shown to have the best of
intentions, where self sacrifice under these circumstances is more than a noble
gesture, there are many more who continue to fall ill, or have sick family
members who are desperate to do something, anything, to avoid becoming another
statistic. Desperate times call for desperate measures, where kidnappings
of prominent health officials may be a way to get medicine faster, as rumors
are rampant that America is hording all the medicine. Drugs are the new
currency, where pharmacies are routinely ransacked. Like any great
disaster movie these days, the National Guard is ordered to secure the mayhem,
accumulating more dead bodies faster than they can dig new graves. This
is the same menacing atmosphere projected in the Danny Boyle zombie flick 28
DAYS LATER (2002), where the world is on the verge of destroying itself and
there are precious few with the capacity to save it. And of course, no
city or region wants to admit they are the source of the virus, as they would
be the scourge of the world, forever associated with this epidemic, so there
could be calculated lies and a series of well-planned cover ups to throw the
investigation off track, which only means more lives lost, as time is literally
running out. But in the world of medicine, you rarely ever see the
individuals who work tirelessly behind the scenes to study the disease,
understand how it operates in the human body, and sufficiently isolate it to
find a cure. Few of us can picture the faces of these small scientific
teams or individuals, as they work with little notoriety in highly secure laboratories,
usually wearing protective suits that resemble what astronauts wore on their
first trip to the moon. In this secretly confined but methodical world,
they painstakingly experiment with trial and error, wait, and then measure the
results, before starting the same process all over again until they find a
positive result. For some, it will always come too late, for others it
never comes at all, but for a few, especially those in the future, why wait for
a disaster, as their lives and the kind of world they will live in will
definitely be determined by the decisions we make today, making it clear that
especially now, every day matters.
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